Friday, December 23, 2005

Dead air

Hitler, Mussolini, Genghis Khan would love the current social climate in America, where Christian right-wingers have made deep forays into state and, yes, the federal government and to that end, the laws of this nation are under assault by people who claim absolute certainty in issues of moral and spiritual judgment.
These are folks who want Planned Parenthood to go out of business, to see ALL doctors who provide abortions stood up against a wall and shot dead, who want private medical records made public venue or, barring that, the right for them, as government officials, to peruse private records for any whim that satisfies their outrage or moral dictates.
These folks claim knowledge divine, insights that scientists, doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists don't comprehend but that these folks say is just "common sense."
In states where teenagers find contraception is made difficult or impossible to access, unwanted pregnancy rates soar, STD rates climb precipitously, yet these good folk say they've got the "welfare" of the children at the forefront of their actions.
Hitler would have felt right at home among these groups who, with arrogant, self-righteous certitude, claim a corner on the truth market. There's only a hair's breadth of difference between their dogma and that of Hitler's claims of Jewish conspiracy and Jewish filthiness and lesser humans lesser worth, in the case of non-Aryan races.
Oh yea, these are Godly folk who have kids and go to church on Sundays -- sometimes more often -- and who want to wrest political power away from secularists so they can make their religion and its viewpoints the laws of the land.
Under this Christian right-wing onslaught, our government's strength is eroding and our nation's beauty as a social construct is crumbling. It's not the erosion of moral values that worries me so much as the full-frontal assault on egalitarian democracy as practiced by this segment of society that holds forth that they are right and all who oppose them are bound for hell.
Yea, I'm sure that this rising political movement is tilling fertile soil for the likes of Pol Pot or anyone who aspires to dictatorship.